Rare tie bids for Muskegon County contracts could be decided by a coin toss

“No one I’ve talked to can remember there was ever a tie.”
-- Muskegon County Administrator Bonnie Hammersley

Heath Kaplan

MUSKEGON, MI -- In the complex world of government contracts, tie bids are all but unheard of.

In her four years as Muskegon County administrator, Bonnie Hammersley can’t remember a single time that two or more contractors bid exactly the same amount for a government contract.

“No one I’ve talked to can remember there was ever a tie,” she said.

Nevertheless, the county Board of Commissioners is set to approve next week a catch-all policy for what to do if there ever is a tie.

The new policy is pretty simple: Flip a coin.

“In the case of a tie bid or quote, when all factors including pricing are considered equal, a coin toss shall be used to determine which of the tied bidders receive the award,” the proposed policy language says.

“That language is the exact language out of the federal policy,” Hammersley said.

The new policy -- approved by a committee on Tuesday and set to be considered by the full county Board of Commissioners early next week – mirrors policies already used locally on state and federal projects. It’s one last piece of a bigger effort by Finance and Management Services Director Heath Kaplan to give all of the county departments a single purchasing policy that mirrors federal purchasing guidelines.

Kaplan said when he arrived in 2010, the county had three different purchasing policies. In addition to the county’s own purchasing policy, the Muskegon Area Transit System (MATS) had its own policy, as did the Department of Employment and Training.

“I thought that was kind of crazy that the county had to maintain three different purchasing policies,” Kaplan said.

The reason, he said, that MATS and the department of employment and training had different policies stemmed from the fact that they received state and federal funds. So he set to work making a single county policy that mirrored federal guidelines.

The new tie bid policy is one of the last pieces of the puzzle. Kaplan said he wanted to get the county’s policy lined up with federal policy before a federal audit coming up in a few weeks.

It’s a small change, but it does away with a clause tha appears to support a local preference for companies. A provision in the old county policy favors “a bidder domiciled in Muskegon County” when two or more bids or quotes are equal in price and any other factors.

Likewise, “preference shall be given to bidders domiciled in the State of Michigan when tied with bidders not domiciled in Michigan.” According to the old county policy, in the more unlikely event of the occasion that the tied bidders are equally local, the contract is to be awarded by a coin-toss.

The new tie bid policy, though, skips over the local preference clause, moving the decision into the realm of head-or-tails and call-it-in-the-air as soon as a tie occurs.

Hammersley said the new tie bid policy won’t change how the company operates.

“Muskegon County does not have a local preference purchasing policy and this does not change that,” she said.

Hammersley said the policy change on bidding wasn’t related to the advent of more than $30 million in government contracts anticipated as a part of construction of the planned Muskegon County Jail.